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The Reviews for Cross (2011)

Reviewed bygavin6942Vote: 4/10/10Given incredible power by an ancient Celtic cross, Callan (Brian AustinGreen) continues to fight evil... Now, joined by a team of weaponsexperts, Callan battles an unstoppable empire in Los Angeles.

I want to find the words to describe this film without beingdisrespectful, but it is just not a good movie. I see the potential,and some moments are better than others, but the film wavers betweenhumor and seriousness with a cacophony of sound and juxtaposition ofimages that hurts the mind. Some films, notably "The Spirit", havebalanced this well. This film has not. Would it make more sense if Ihad read the comic? Probably. But as a comic fan, I never heard of thisone, so I think it is safe to say few people will know what is going onany more than I did. I learned a new word, though: Anzshlastic. Does itmean anything? Probably not.

Seemingly, the movie was made to coincide with the Green Lantern movie.Not that there is any connection, but someone here has a glowing greencross that gives him super powers. Sounds like another hero's ring.Beyond that, no connection, and the plot is a big mess. There is theconcept of finding the bloodlines of the Greek gods. For some reason,only one person has the bloodline when you would think all theirdistant cousins would, too. And there are multiple villains, withlittle background offered about them.

The dialogue is written for a ten-year old. Sometimes we get decentone-liners (most of which come from Backfire, Jake Busey's character)and there was a good Gary Busey "Point Break" joke. But often we haveeverything dumbed down. Gunnar (Vinnie Jones) says over and over againthat he is immortal and will be the last to die. Yeah, I got it. Did hehave to repeat it? No. All this does is take a great actor like Jonesand make him look like a fool.

The press release is far from accurate, too. It says "beautiful, youngwomen start disappearing". Young, maybe. Beautiful? Hardly. And what isthis about Gunnar being an immortal Viking? That never plays into theplot at all, and he clearly has an English rather than Norse accent.The only thing really going for this film is the cast. Besides thosementioned, we also have Brian Austin Green, Tom Sizemore, MichaelClarke Duncan, Danny Trejo, Lew Temple and C. Thomas Howell. How such agreat ensemble ended up in this stinker is beyond me.

Nowhere in the press release or on the DVD cover is there a singlequote from a review. Also, it arrived for me to review a week after itwas released. This leads me to one conclusion: the people behind thisfilm know it is not good and want to avoid more bad coverage (though,to do that, they should never have sent it at all). Possibly redeemingit is a director's commentary (I have not listened). There are deletedscenes, but those amount to single sentences trimmed from variousspots. Why they were cut at all is beyond me. In short, avoid this filmlike the plague. Besides Jake Busey, it is a failure (and that is a sadthing when Busey is the best part of your film)

Reviewed byamnesiac12001Vote: 4/10/10This film is a textbook case of "biting off more than you can chew."Which sucks because with a couple million bucks, it could've beensomething impressive.

The premise is actually promising: mythological-powered heroes sharingthe spotlight with action heroes in a comic book universe as they savethe world from supernatural threats. There are actually some clever andwell-written lines and zingers in the script, and these are the linesusually best delivered. It also manages to not take itself tooseriously, which makes it easier to digest. I'd argue that it's adirect descendant of "Adventure of Buckaroo Banzai" which makes it'sfailure all the more painful.

Unfortunately, the movie tries to do too much with too little. Whilehalf the cast is composed of well-known and very talented actors, theother half is composed of stunt men and friends of the director's, andit shows. The budget is woefully small for subject matter of thismagnitude, and while there's some spirited camera-work and cleverproduction schemes to compensate, it doesn't quite pull off.

The biggest problem is that the director didn't have what he needed tolight it properly. Considering that the budget was likely under$800,000 it could have been anything: not enough lights, not enoughmoney to get additional shooting days, or not enough money to keep thetalent on longer than needed, etc. but the limits of the budget reallyshow. The setups are nowhere near as dynamic as they need to be, thelighting is stark and practical, and the set design virtuallynonexistent. The setups reminded me of a lot of mid-budget HD pornmovies where they shoot the action head-on and in two shots to keep theborders of the set (and the warehouse beyond) out of frame.

The cast is staggeringly impressive; there's some real talent here, andSizemore, Busey and Jones tend to have the best delivery of some trulyunderwhelming lines, but even their contributions can't distract fromthe fact that the film was so rushed that they didn't have time tolearn their lines as well as they should. In the commentary, thedirector admits that Sizemore often had to learn his lines minutesbefore they shot a scene, so this probably happened more often thannot. More than anything, it looks like Hollywood actors doing a favorfor a film student and his buddies.

Visually, it looks like a cross between "Repo: The Genetic Opera," "TheBatman XXX" parody, and the "Angel of Death" web series with Zoe Bell.

Still, the fact that the director managed to get the film made with thecast he did for the money he had and in LOS ANGELES (at God knows WHATrates) is nevertheless impressive, and I have to respect him for that.Because the budget was so low, it's hard to tell how much of the film'sfailure is due to ineptitude or finance, so I'm not going to write offthe filmmakers just yet. With more money and a larger crew, he mightactually have done this (or the sequel) right.

It falls short of the "Buckaroo Banzai" level it wants to be, but its adigital age cult curio nonetheless. Perhaps not one of the best, but noless worthy of consideration.

Reviewed bymarkus_isteriVote: 1/10/10oh my god, how is it possible to make such an terrible movie. therewasn't a thing in the entire movie that was good, i sat an watchthrough it all just to see if they had done something right. there are2 things i especially disliked. 1: the camera work, the way they werefilming was annoying and just made it even more clear what a bigamateur movie it was. 2: the guy that ran around with the ball, i meanin a movie with terrible actors he out shined them all in being aterrible actor. This movie is honestly the worst movie I seen. i'veseen adult movies with better actors! catastrophe, ridiciculous,ombelivlible ,sucks. silly: cross

The Plot Summary for Cross (2011)

Given incredible power by an ancient Celtic Cross. Callan continues to fight evil... Now, joined by a team of weapons experts, Callan battles an unstoppable empire in Los Angeles.